Response to "Mental Health Blogs Going Bye-Bye?"

From one of Furious Seasons’s latest posts:

Mental Health Blogs Going Bye-Bye?

As I noted earlier, there’s a spate of mental health blogs that are going on hiatus of some kind. Now, it’s my sad duty to report that Gianna Kali’s Bipolar Blast blog is going on an indefinite hiatus as well. You can read her post "Quitting?" for the details. Bottom line: all those years of very high doses of psych meds seem to have injured her body. I cannot even begin to send her enough good wishes. I cannot even begin to express my disgust with some of the bad doctors she ran into over the years.

Also, the Psych Survivor blog, written by a man I only know as Mark, was taken down a few weeks ago, and from what I gather he is in the hospital with heart problems. His was/is a good and strident voice on these issues we all care about and his work is missed.

All of this kind of makes me feel glum, since the two people above had been at the blogging game for well over a year and I sensed that they’d both be around long-term. These are people I care about and it sucks that they won’t be the presence they once were.

Why is it that mental health blogs are so difficult to do and keep going? Why is it so hard for them to find the substantial audiences they deserve? The Internet is crowded with blogs about politics, technology, gadgets, gossip and parenting and many of these seem to do quite well and have huge audiences and long lives, despite the fact that many of them are merely echoes of one another. Are readers of blogs that simple-minded that all they need is the latest news and opinion on Apple’s or Microsoft’s latest bit of software or Obama’s or Hillary’s latest gaffe?

You’d think in a country where 10 percent of the population is on anti-depressants and another 5 percent to 10 percent is likely on some other psych med that there would be a substantial audience for these issues (regardless of what one makes of the dominant mental health paradigm), especially given how wildly popular neuroscience is on the Net. It makes me wonder if we all–and here I include myself–have done something wrong in how we analyze these issues (are we too contrarian?) or if we all simply haven’t been crowded out of the big search engines (that’s how most people find mental health information online) because the Net is so over-populated with pharma sites and allied pro-pharma health websites. I can certainly say that the mainstream media–which usually loves writing about characters on the Net who push against life’s many intellectual tides–has given very little attention to sites like this one, despite the fact that sites like mine have been a very real service to many in the media.

Or maybe the mainstream approach to mental health care is right and the public is just trying to tell us something.

What do you think?

I’ll tell you what I think.

Alaska's "clinical" trial of Eli Lilly over Zyprexa

Since I've been gone, a trial has begun in Alaska against Eli Lilly because of its off-label drug marketing of Zyprexa. Then, Connecticut recently decided to join a growing list of states going after Lilly as a result of the Zyprexa deal. There is so much going on with this case I can't even keep up.

But that's what we keep Philip Dawdy around for. 🙂

Today's lesson: Paxil and Lexapro are not great antidepressants

Dawdy at Furious Seasons wrote a post on an editorial in the LA Times by Summer Beretsky’s experience with Paxil. After reading her editorial, I’m reminded that my own experience with one antidepressant wasn’t all that unique. Her drug was Paxil for panic attacks; mine was Lexapro for depression following a 3-month (on-and-off) stint with Paxil. I’m struck by the similarity of our experiences; not only did the same thing happened to me but I was also a communications major in college as well.

Paxil had one pretty undesirable effect on me: I started to lose interest in just about everything. I stopped initiating social activities (who needs that sort of thing?) and was no longer motivated to perform well academically.

My emotions had flat-lined: I hadn’t cried in months, nor had I proverbially jumped for joy. I felt — nothing.

I can still remember sleeping in bed at home on a weekday when I should have been at class. It was 2 in the afternoon, around the time my copy editing class was to begin. My boyfriend at the time (now my husband) lived in Kentucky while I attended college in New York. He planned to visit me that weekend but was getting fed up with my depression and listlessness. He called from work to tell me to get up and go to class. I mumbled on the phone, half-confused, and said no. He demanded, “Why not?” I said quite plainly, “Because I don’t care.” He said, “If you don’t get up and go to class, I won’t visit you this weekend.”

I replied, “I don’t care.”

Blogs around the way

I’m catching up on reading my fellow bloggers’ posts (see Blogroll to the right), so if you’re not reading their site already, I’d encourage you to do so. Below  are some posts that caught my attention. Some might be a little dated.

Gianna at Bipolar Blast: Has a video up of Gwen Olsen, an ex-pharma rep who says that pharmaceutical companies aren’t in the  business of curing but in the business of "disease maintenance and symptom management." It’s nothing new but here are two quotes that caught my attention:

"And what I’m saying is provable is that the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t want to cure people. You need to understand specifically when we’re talking about psychiatric drugs in particular that these are drugs that encourage people to remain customers of the pharmaceutical industry. In fact, you will be told if you’re given a drug such as an anxiolytic, or an antidepressant, or an antipsychotic drug, that you may be on the drug for the rest of your life. And very frequently, people find that they are on the drug for a very long period of time, if not permanently, because they’re almost impossible to get off of. Some of them can have very serious withdrawal symptoms – most of them can have extremely serious withdrawal symptoms if they’re stopped cold turkey – but some people experience even withdrawal symptoms when they try to titrate or they try to eliminate the drug little by little, day after day."

"We have got to start making the pharmaceutical industry accountable for their actions and for the defective products they’re putting on the market. It won’t be long before every American is affected by this disaster and we need to be aware of what the differences are between diseases between disorders and between syndromes. Because if it doesn’t have to be scientifically proven, if there are no tests, if there are no blood tests, CAT scans, urine tests, MRIs – if there is nothing to document that you have disease, then you in fact, do not have a disease, you have a disorder and it has been given and has been diagnosed pretentiously and you need to get yourself educated and understand that there are options and those options are much more effective than drugs."

I’ve always wondered why doctors don’t run tests to diagnose any psychiatric disorders. From NIMH:

Research indicates that depressive illnesses are disorders of the brain. Brain-imaging technologies, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), have shown that the brains of people who have depression look different than those of people without depression. The parts of the brain responsible for regulating mood, thinking, sleep, appetite and behavior appear to function abnormally. In addition, important neurotransmitters–chemicals that brain cells use to communicate–appear to be out of balance. But these images do not reveal why the depression has occurred.

If MRIs have shown that the people with depression have a part of the brain that functions abnormally then why isn’t it standard for all people diagnosed with depression to have an MRI done to confirm this? I have one of two hypotheses:  it’s too expensive to get an MRI done for each person and that insurance won’t pay for it or the abnormal functioning cannot be detected in the brain of every depressed person.  Therefore, is major depressive disorder really a made-up diagnosis?

The New Little Button

UPDATE: Please donate to Furious Seasons first. I reread his blog thoroughly today and it really struck me that if he didn’t make enough during his fund-raiser, he was going to scale back writing on the site.  He’s one of the main reasons that this blog continues to go on. He certainly inspires me and I know he’s an inspiration to a lot of bloggers as well. I think his fund-raising season is over but I know he’d still appreciate anything he gets. Heck, I’m going to dig up some pennies myself and throw them his way. But if you have $1 left over, that’ll do just fine.

I’ve joined the likes of Furious Seasons and The Last Psychiatrist and placed a PayPal donate button on my site. I’m currently unemployed and would like to get at least $12 a month to pay for my use of this site. I might mention the little button every now and then but there’s no pressure to donate really. But if you like my blog enough and have a dollar or so that you’d like to spare, please feel free. Google AdSense didn’t work out for me because of "invalid clicks" so I’ll have to look to other forms of ad revenue to keep me going. (Others have had trouble with it too.) I signed up with Typepad’s links a while ago but nothing ever came of that. I’ll try it again and see if I have better luck with it this time around. Otherwise, I hope  $12  per month isn’t too steep of a cost. Thanks in advance for any pennies that are thrown my way.

Nothing you didn't already know

Antidepressants don’t help those with bipolar disorder. Duh. See Furious Seasons’ take on it.

Babies and toddlers are mentally ill

The new fad? Diagnosing young children with mental illness.

Oh and I mean young.

Originally, I’d written about how psychiatrists are diagnosing mental illness in infants. Mental health blogs now are all over the Rebecca Riley case and rightly so.  She was a 2½-­year-old toddler diagnosed with ADHD and bipolar disorder. How a psychiatrist can diagnose a child that young is beyond me.

intueri has written a brilliant post about the case and diagnosing children that young:

“We need to stop labeling behavior as pathological just because it causes us inconvenience. We also need to stop using diagnoses as means of absolving us of our responsibilities (”it was the bipolar that made me say those mean things to you; it wasn’t me”). We, as providers, need to stop colluding in these goals: We need to stop the belief that a pill will always cure everything.”

(linkage attribution: Furious Seasons)

Catching up: Furious Seasons

I’ve been out of it. Really out of it.

In my backlog of reading, Furious Seasons has posted the results of what he’s entitled, "The Zyprexa Chronicles."

The judge ruled in favor of Lilly.

Holy crap. I knew this would happen, but hoped it wouldn’t.

This all occurred on Feb. 13, so I’m really behind the times here. (Did Punxsawtawney Phil see his shadow yet?) But it’s a reminder to, not just the blogosphere, but also to the media that, well, pharma companies are more powerful and have more sway in court.

After reading a bit more on the situation (ok – I’m getting all my info from ONE blog), it seems that the judge hasn’t really ruled against blogs using or disseminating these documents (MindFreedom.org being the exception apparently) but these leaked documents could cause Lilly "irreparable harm." What? Documents that need to be made public would harm Lilly? It’s David against Goliath. Mainstream media — CBS, ABC, NBC, AP — haven’t picked up on this story. The majority of Americans – I’d venture to say the majority of Zyprexa consumers – don’t know about the proven side effects of this drug. I highly doubt it would cause "irreparable harm."

Classic quote:

"The way reporters work is a good deal for the public. We get paid like school teachers, think like lawyers and detectives, fight like Marines when necessary and write like… oh, nevermind."

Man, ain’t it the truth. Especially the schoolteacher pay. Except in Brooklyn, NY where they’ll pay a starting teacher at $40K because they need teachers in the inner city. But I digress.

"So, Ms. [Marni] Lemons (Eli Lilly spokeswoman), what I reported on yesterday — that your company was talking about potentially downplaying glucose increases noted in studies used to approve Zyprexa for long-term use in bipolar disorder — was based on these documents and it sure looks to me like your employees were strategizing all over the Lilly email system. I contacted your press office on Monday and asked them to respond to several questions about that document. Your people never responded….

The same goes for you people at the FDA. Stop telling me to file FOIAs in order to get basic public information that affects millions of people that should already be freely available on your website."

For those who don’t know, FOIA stands for Freedom of Information Act, in which anyone can write to a governmental agency and appeal for documents that have been made public. The nice part about this? The agency can black out information that don’t want you to know. They can deny your request, block out some data, or block out so much that the document ends up being useless. Oh, and FOIAs take forever and freaking day to arrive because the gov’t sends them when it’s convenient for them.

Furious Seasons has also been following the NYT’s coverage about a child diagnosed with ADHD and bipolar, who was killed and supposedly overdosed on medication. Riiight. Unfortunately, from what I can see – perhaps I’ll find a bit more – the NYT is extensively covering mental health issues. Perhaps they’re getting a ton of hits on the Zyprexa series and have figured out that people actually care about mental health topics. Whatever the reasoning, I’m glad they’re doing it.

Astute observation from Furious Seasons:

"This whole diagnose-medicate-blame-the-"illness"-for-bad-outcomes nonsense has got to stop. It’s bad enough in adults and teens, but in kids it is a complete outrage. It is interesting to me, though, that when a child dies, the skeptical questions are asked. When an adult has awful results from taking Zyprexa, say, or Paxil, the media is largely silent."

More to come on other blogs…

Blogs vs. Mainstream Media

“Mr. [James B.] Gottstein, [a lawyer from Alaska, who was pursuing unrelated litigation for mentally ill patients in his state], sends [Dr. David Egilman, a consulting witness in ongoing litigation against Lilly] a subpoena for copies. Hell begins breaking loose.” – Tom Zeller, Jr. in The New York Times

I think Furious Seasons originally linked to this (I can’t remember the source of the post), but I read this on the NYT and had a few thoughts, regarding brick-and-mortar courts vs. “teh Internets.”

Warning: Rant ahead.

I can’t help but think back to the 2004 showdown between Dan Rather and CBS (endearingly named Rathergate) vs. political blogs regarding a memo about George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard. From NewsMax:

“Added [Matthew] Sheffield [of RatherBiased.com]: ‘A virtual think-tank was born… Forty-seven posts later, a person who called himself ‘Buckhead’ offered the proposition that he thought the documents were forgeries.’

Sheffield and his Web site jumped on the bandwagon, searching the Web for experts on 1970’s typewriters. Another blogger site, PowerlineBlog.com, raised the question of forgery. ‘Matt Drudge and his DrudgeReport.com then linked to the Powerline piece, and the story took off,’ recounted Sheffield.”

Someone please tell Drudge about Zyprexa, Risperdal, Cymbalta, Seroquel, Abilify, and blah blah blah, psych med, blah blah blah.

“Some media observers now contend the “Blogosphere” is rapidly replacing CBS and the rest of the mainstream media.

“You’ll note that several blogs rank higher than mid-size daily newspapers and some are pushing the sites of papers in the top 50 (by daily circulation). The data suggest that the question isn’t “When will blogs arrive?” but rather “Blogs HAVE arrived, what now?” [said Kevin Aylward of Wizbangblog.]”

I’ll probably have a string of quotes from the newsmax article, but I will eventually get to my point.

I quoted this previously, but it’s worth requoting:

“It’s great that [Philip] Dawdy [of Furious Seasons] has stepped up for a huge, mainly voiceless population, but on the other hand, it’s weird to see citizen journalists so responsible for watchdogging our mental health industry. When we hear newspapers complain about declining readership, we can’t help but think it’s mainly because — gosh, this is awkward — the shit they’re reporting on isn’t newsworthy. And this shit is.” – Seattlest

Bloggers are mental health watchdogs

Seattlest wrote a piece on Philip Dawdy and how he’s been tracking the story of a cop who was fired for being bipolar despite several years of stellar service on the force. I can’t investigate things to the depth that he can, but Seattlest has an awesome quote that I had to use here:

"It’s great that Dawdy has stepped up for a huge, mainly voiceless population, but on the other hand, it’s weird to see citizen journalists so responsible for watchdogging our mental health industry. When we hear newspapers complain about declining readership, we can’t help but think it’s mainly because — gosh, this is awkward — the shit they’re reporting on isn’t newsworthy. And this shit is." [emphasis all mine]

With the exception of the NYT, no one else IS monitoring the mental health industry for abuse of power. It’s pretty sad that organizations like NIH and NIMH, which are supposed to be helping patients, can be bought out. Can the mental health bloggers take down Big Pharma like the political bloggers took down, uh, well… Dan Rather?